Landing Page Tutorial Part 3

Ok people, sorry for the lack of posts the last week or so, things have been busy busy. The private and Free PPC Mentoring section of the forum is alive and well and I will be posting some hot stuff in there this week! I’ve already answered tons of questions that would have taken a lot of trial and error to figure out, so if you haven’t joined our Free PPC Mentoring yet, better hurry. I’ve already talked about finding your targeted demographics and designing your landing pages accordingly. And in part 2 we identified key components in a landing page. In this post I want to cover some basic optimization tips and things you need to continually focus on to improve your landing pages. So let’s begin!

Landing Page Testing and Optimization

Here is a very important tip when you are first about to launch a campaign. You want to create atleast 3-4 different landing page designs. And when I say different, I mean completely different. Each one should have their different colors, header, layout, HEADLINE (the attention grabbing one), different approaches, so instead of saying “Check out these Reviews”, a secondary test would be “The Most Trusted Products are” or whatever creativity you want to put into your market. Try with a picture of your product, try without, try with a video, try without, test it all.

So the Basic Steps Are:

1. Create atleast 3-4 completely different LP designs, with different approaches, colors, looks and headline. (Most of the time you can keep the same body content but it wouldn’t hurt to test different body copy too.)

2. When you launch the campaign you should immediately be split testing 2 LPs, run them until each LP has received at least 70 clicks from the LP to the offer and a minimum of 3 conversions. Take the LP with the best CTR and CR and test the LP #3 with the winner of round one, the find the best of those two and repeat the same process with LP #4. After you have chosen the best design/layout concept of atleast 3-4 different LPs, you can now begin the next step.

3. Split testing the same LP and changing one variable at a time. So now you’ve identified the best layout/design concept for your LP, so you duplicate it. Now you have an Original LP (the winner of all your designs) and the Test LP (which is the exact same LP as the original except we are going to test one change at a time on it.). The first thing you want to test is the headline. On the Original LP you never touch a thing, on the Test LP, you want to change the headline to something completely different and test it against the original LP. Take the best performing LP of the two and repeat that a couple of times. (By the way, after each test you run, the best performing LP then becomes your Original LP and you duplicate that LP and test a new change.) Then work on testing your call to action that is above the fold. Then maybe add or test different images if you have some on your page. Try adding a video to your LP if it would be relevant. Test different color schemes, test the location of the call to action, maybe add an arrow pointing to it. Test absolutely every single thing but do it one at a time and NO more than ONE at a time.

4. Test different offers. If you are running a single offer landing page, if you are aware of similar offers in your niche, test each offer to see which one converts the best. If you are doing a review style landing page, test the positions of the offers you are running. You might have the best performing offer in position #3 when it could be the only thing keeping you from being profitable, if you had it in position #1, you could very well be banking!

5. Use tools like CrazyEgg, Clickheat and Clicktale to help you better understand what type of interaction is going on with your landing page. Exactly where are they clicking, what they are doing, what attracts them the most. That is priceless data.

6. And be creative, try split testing your normal top converting LP against the same LP but with an exit pop that auto redirects to the offer, might be able to gain a few more conversions that way. Or make the exit pop ask them leaving visitor for their email address and name, so that you can inform them of special offers or related information to what they are searching for. Then you can do email marketing on them later. And email marketing is highly effective!

7. Final Point – TEST EVERYTHING ONE AT A TIME! And don’t give up so easily!

Landing Page Optimizing for Great Quality Score

Some people make the biggest deal about getting a high Google quality score. I can honestly say I’ve rarely had a problem with my QS. The reason is, I’ve fed the hungry beast of an engine, GOOGLE, and they are always satisfied with my cooking. And believe me, you’d probably have already found your first successful campaign if you would focus on your landing pages and quality score and do it right. There are many point of views about how to get a good QS with Google, I’m merely going to list the things that I do to get a good QS. This mostly applies to Google’s terms because Yahoo and MSN QS is VERY simple to please.

1. I almost always build my websites/affiliate sites from a WordPress foundation. I’m not an extremely great designer/web programmer so I tend to take the easy route. I put a WordPress CMS (Content Management System) in place, which essentially means I make my wordpress blog look like an actual website even though it is powered by WordPress. I make static pages, remove the blog posts from the front page and relocate them to another page typically names ‘Articles’. WordPress is superb when it comes to being SEO friendly, which helps it get indexed quicker, more likable by Google, tons of nifty plugins to manipulate things however I want. Both SEO and non-SEO. Another reason why I use wordpress as my foundation is because its so easy to update. I can teach literally anyone to update new content or whatever else that needs to be done.

3. You need to have at least 5 (preferably 10) unique article pages on the site as well. It helps if they are written were they sound factual and professional with external reference points. As you begin to optimize your campaign and realize that it has profitable potential, you need to continually add more articles to it. Two articles a week is a good number (ex:1 on Monday, 1 on Friday.)

4. On your landing page, at the very bottom, you want to link to the following pages: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Privacy, Disclaimer, Terms and Conditions, Resource Links and Articles and 3 additional links to high authority external sources, like Wikipedia, CNN, FOX, .edu’s, etc.

5. Perhaps put A, as in 1, one, numero uno, Adsense box, that blends extremely well with your website and is nowhere near the call to actions so they wouldn’t effect it and only place the Adsense on your CMS section, not the landing pages. My theory behind it is if Google sees you are also trying to monetize by Adsense, you are continually adding new content, getting organic traffic, you are looking to be around a while and not just throw up a page and a campaign for a one night stand.

Those tips right there are some important steps that will put you way ahead of the game and competition. Feel free to ask whatever questions you have about this tutorial series in the comments below and I will answer them on my next part in the serious, which will include some rather fun stuff, so stay tuned!

Something that you touched on, but I’d like to emphasize: I think it’s crucial to QS to get your site indexed and past any potential filters (what we’d formerly call the Sandbox.) This isn’t talked about much, but people should really get their domain up, indexed, and make sure you’re not tripping any filters or penalties before adding it to AdWords. I’ve had much greater success following this path. You should be able to go from a newly-registered domain to ready to put it on AdWords in 3-4 days tops if you’re using WordPress appropriately (blog pings, sitemap pings.)

The one thing I disagree with:
“7. Final Point – TEST EVERYTHING ONE AT A TIME!”

This may unnecessarily waste valuable PPC budget. Employing multivariate testing methods has become available to the “unwashed masses,” so to speak, with the easy-to-use Google Website Optimizer. It’s worth looking into.

Andrew, my question is along the lines of Dahee’s. When using wordpress how do you rotate landers?

Also in your display url, do you use “domain.com” or “domain.com/index1.php” and “domain.com/index2.php”. I have been getting flagged by the “inaccurate display url” error w/in adwords lately. It’s been super picky with my recent campaigns.

Do you have any themes you like to use for your wordpress landers? 1, 2 or 3 columns?

@Daehee – This is my first time using WP as a content management system for my landers. I have set up several as blogging platforms but never as a landing page.

So I’m thinking there is no nav bar until the user get’s to the bottom of the page just like a normal lander. Is this an option w/in wordpress or does it depend on the theme you choose?

Sorry if this seems basic. I’m an asp.net guy by trade and now I’m just getting into php/mysql platform simply because WordPress makes it easy and I have been hearing that it scores out well with Google.

How long does it take you to create 3-4 different landing pages? Are they all same style (all review pages for example) ior are theyr different style (review, comparison and solo). How do you go about creating them? Do you hire a designer? Are those initial landing pages rich in graphics or just using plain css, stock images and layout?

I’m about to launch a campaign. I was thinking of doing direct linking and then creating a landing page. I suppose that’s the wrong way to go about it?

-G

February 23, 2009

Sakana

Could you recommend Content Management System that you have used? Thanks.

February 23, 2009

Sakana

Let me rephrase my question, have you used automatic scheduled post for content management instead of article writing? If yes, what you recommend?

Some great advice here on testing. I have been in IT for years and testing has always been so important, but many I know in the IM world just seem to neglect it as unfortunately they really don’t realize how much it can effect their bottom line. Good advice on WordPress too – for any type of website it is the way to go!

landing page optimisation is important and understanding the concept is vital for my knid of business.Great post and thanks for helping out with the use of WordPress as a CMS. Also great to read the part 3 of this post.